Dear iDigBio Friends and Family,
Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) is halfway through its fourth year and has many exciting plans for 2015, including continuing community training, promoting collection data use, and increasing education and outreach efforts. To celebrate last year’s accomplishments, iDigBio invites everyone to explore the resources it is currently making available to the biological collections community.
Visit the iDigBio Portal and search over 24 million specimen records and 4 million media records. The portal search page was updated in 2014, and now includes new or updated features including a taxonomic synonyms search feature, a redesign of specimen and media pages, and a point-clustering feature for the map to better visualize individual records with similar coordinates. iDigBio also revamped the Research Page on the iDigBio website to include links to tools that integrate web services like PhyloJIVE and Arbor. Why don’t you consider starting off the New Year by sharing data through iDigBio? Incorporating data into the portal allows a collection’s holdings to be visible and available to researchers and educators around the world.
In 2014, iDigBio held 23 events with over 1,000 participants in 13 different locations. In addition to physical events, iDigBio hosted 26 webinars (virtual events) that provided additional training on a broad range of digitization and other collection-centered topics. iDigBio meticulously documents presentations, recordings, and other products from all workshops and webinars on the iDigBio Wiki and in the Bibliography, ensuring that the shared knowledge and accomplishments from the event become a permanent resource for the collections community. This year is projected to be an even busier year.
Stay up-to-date with iDigBio in 2015 by visiting http://idigbio.org. When visiting the website, be sure to monitor the constantly evolving Wiki for content specific to digitization and collections, read press releases for ADBC-related news, and view reports for summaries of past events and publications related to the iDigBio community. Visit the iDigBio Calendar to view the upcoming workshops, webinars, and other iDigBio-related events coming in 2015. Stay connected with iDigBio by “liking” the project’s Facebook page, following iDigBio on Twitter, and joining the e-newsletter. Anyone can join the conversation in one of the many topic-based working groups or listservs provided by iDigBio.
Thank you to all who contributed data to the portal, collaborated in a TCN, and/or participated in one of our 49 events and webinars in 2014. iDigBio hopes everyone continues to be engaged and has a fantastic and productive 2015!
